Why are listening to this podcast? You're probably doing something else too. It's cool. We get it. When you're having conversations with your customers. The same is probably true for them. Their messaging, their teams are mentally planning date nights, so growing conversations beyond the moment can be challenging. So HubSpot helps you go beyond the moment by connecting you and your team's giving you access to the same exact data and helping you see the full customer picture with powerful tools that connect Marketing sales Ops and service have spots. Powerful CRM, platform Powers you and your team to transform.
Customers moments into extraordinary customer experiences. Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com when I saw you went and did the watch site holding key. I was like a Blog for luxury watches. What the hell is this guy
thinking? Did you did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue and now it's Sam said, it's over 100 million. Yeah, yeah, we're over 100 million in
Revenue now, man, that is why I can
say
I feel like I can rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to put my all into it. Like all Days on the Road, Less Traveled, never looking back. What's up? All right, in this episode, we are sitting down with Kevin Rose. A lot of, you know, Kevin because he's an internet OG. He created dig back in the day. He was a seed investor in Twitter and a bunch of other cool companies. He was been a, he's been a vis, he's been a Founder, he launched it recently. Launched a 10 ft project that's done hundreds of millions of dollars worth of entity sales.
And so Kevin has been around for awhile and the cool part of the interview. If you, if you listen to it, you're going to see very chill guy. Very down to earth. Very humble, not a kind of like, oh my God, I'm going to go take over the world, you know, bubbling over with ambition and a big chip on his shoulder. Seem like a happy dude, who was enjoying himself and had a ton of success in the process. And I like that, I like seeing different people who play the game with different and different ways and he's definitely somebody who's interested. We talked about a bunch of
a projects that you may not know about. So for example, is creating watch fill this Niche project for watches That Grew From 1 million in Revenue to now over 100 million after it. Got Acquired and merged with her dinky then. Also, we talked about how he hires writers. We talked about how he got into Twitter as an early investor and what does he do with his money? So he's got a bunch of money. How does he invest it? Where does he put it? And the answer is not what you may have expected. The last thing we did at the end as we
Did the crypto debate. So Sam is sort of a crypto skeptic. Kevin is obviously a crypto believer and one of the kind of most well-known guys in the crypto scene, and we had a little debate where we talked about is it all bullshit or are there some use cases? So I hope you enjoy this episode with Kevin Rose. I liked it. I think you will too.
So Kevin we're live, we should get, like, a brief overview, but, like, your resume. We don't really talk too much about, like, resumes and stuff. But your resume is like crazy Lon.
Long. So I've been following you forever. So I've known about your work so you started dig which was what did you start?
1004 2004. That's
right. Yeah, and so you were it was like one of the original like site like link aggregators and it was like a cultural phenomenon and that was crazy. And you were like was it Time magazine that you're on the cover of
like
businessweek businessweek? It was like, here's this young kid taken over Silicon Valley. What's the internet and who's this kid? Controlling it type of thing and like that. It had all this hype, but like big didn't turn out maybe as wonderful as like we
I thought maybe it could have done but then you like had your finger on the pulse of all these other things, you've done at dig. You don't is it? I read it all the time but is it pronounce holding key
holding a dinky? Yeah.
O-genki a watch blog that also like sells watches, you're a partner at Google Ventures. You have this app called zero fasting that I use, I love partner a true Ventures which I still think you're right now. You've got the oak meditation app and then I have a feeling there's like five or ten, other things that you just have Brewing that like I don't even know. Like most of you probably don't even know about
But you're basically, my point is, is like your kind of an Internet OG and you are incredibly prolific? I mean, does that kind of summarize
it? Yeah, I mean the, the most recent thing I started was proof which is our Venture into the world of in ftes. And so, that's the only thing missing from from that in that, that's about 10 months old now. So so from the outside, if I look at this kind of like, collection of our like, their career path, it looks very random. It's like, you know, from, you know, from Venture back.
Angel Investing to venture investing, too. Kind of like a niche communities. You know, these like kind of apps that are like, simple like, like meditation or fasting. You did a podcast, you need to show, you know, you're done. Bunch of content. You did a bunch of different things was there a method to the madness as this to do just described it as random or is there kind of like some underlying theme to this whole thing? Yeah. There's I would say that I've always been one yeah ever. Since I was a little kid to just tinker and 2 is 22.
Play. And if there's any method to the madness, it is. This common thread of exploration. And just wanting to. If I see something that doesn't exist, that should exist, I want to go build it. And I've done that, a handful of times, you know, probably at least 10 to 15 businesses of which, you know, ninety percent of them, go to zero. And then there's a few that pop and become, you know, pretty big. So it's just this idea that I don't want to sit on the sidelines.
If there's something that's exciting that needs to be built, I'd rather just spin up a team and go
after it of all those projects. I'm actually going to exclude proof from that because I want to talk all about that in a little while. But of all those projects that I mentioned, which one has been the most financially successful for you
personally. Mmm, that's a good question. Certainly, I would say when I was in the middle of Web 2.0, which was the, the when dig was at its peak, which was
Audi 2003 2006, you know, we were hit around 38 million people a month using the site. It was, you know, of the web to properties. It was one of the largest. It led me to sitting down and, you know, dinners and conversations and hangouts with the Jack dorsey's, and Evan Williams, and Zuckerberg is, and all the household names that became these big products and they were just friends. And so because of that, it was more like, hey, well, you know, do you want to invest in my new thing? And
And so I would say the investment side, it has definitely been the the best financial returns I did. Start a media company that well, I would say there's there's two things that that will three that are two or unrealized and hooding key which is is going to be crazy. A little you know it's over 100 million Revenue a year now which is not.
Whoa
really and then we have this stuff. I'm doing a proof right now which is just been another crazy rocket ship. But in terms of like true exits of businesses that I've started,
It revision3 where I was the cofounders of media company that became Discovery Channel's digital arm, and we sold that for a 35 million dollars back in 2008 or something like that. So that was probably the biggest company sale that I've had. But you know, the much larger on the more Angel investment side and maybe that sale gave you the the ammo to do Angel Investing, or would you have baby without it a bit? But I was already starting to do small.
Investments prior to that. So I didn't have any money. I didn't come from money but when dig really took off and we were a couple of years in to dig investors and this is a very common practice doesn't get talked about a lot but investors come around there like hey you know you're doing this round of financing. Can we take a little pressure off of you as an entrepreneur and buy some of your stock personally, right? And so I sold a little bit of my dig stock enough to give me the ammo to go and do small see checks, you know, put you know 25k and
The, you know, Twitter seed round and put, you know, 25k and or it was more into Facebook but they're a little bit later stage and and so it was it was those little tiny checks that you know, when they turn into multi-billion dollar businesses or pretty
meaningful, how much does 25k into Twitter and Facebook early on actually turned into
it? Millions of dollars and
Twitter seed round. What was the valuation
then? Well, it was difficult because they were a podcast company doing podcast software and then
They they did a new round, they pivoted into Twitter, and so I'll gosh, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the podcast. Oh d00d. Oh, that's right. They Rodeo so yeah, I didn't invest in odile, they had become Twitter and I asked as who I was the tightest with the time because I didn't really know Jack that well yet. And I asked to have a, he was CEO. And I was like, you know, I can, I can I invest and there was no round available at that point. They but he's like, I got this engineer that
Blake. That was leaving and has some stock and was like, just want by some of the stock and as I guess, that sounds great I'll just buy.
So I think I think Gary vaynerchuk's had the same story anybody but he brought out through. Yes, it
really is. Yeah. So here's the funny thing. I so I bought in from Blake and then I told Gary that Blake was selling some and then Twitter and I've actually they had a pre-emptive round come along that really like like five or ten extra valuation and then Blake was like, oh, whoa, whoa, no.
There's an evaluation now any charge carried the new price scary still pissed at me because I got this like really cheap price for Twitter stock. You know and then and then Gary had to pay the more expensive price but that was funny. What do you think
Blake saying right now? I mean Blake probably
just wants one he held onto like half or more and so you know he probably I don't know he if I had to guess he made fifty plus seventy five plus million dollars or something on it. He I'm sure he's okay did at the time because Twitter kind of had like
Well, there's like Odio kind of failing Twitter, who knows. And then there was like this like small community of people in Silicon Valley that were like using it back when it was like texting the, the your updates out like when you're when you were writing that check, did you feel like this is, you know, the next big thing, or was just kind of like, I don't know. My friends are smart. Let's see. Or where was it in that? Something like it was the next big thing because there is I loved. So, as someone that was building a social graph of sorts at dig, you know, there was always,
always this idea prior to Twitter that was bi-directional friendships. So, you know, on MySpace you in friends, during all the others that have come prior to Twitter, you had to actually know the person to see their content. So it was like, I would you like to send a friend request? Yes. Do you accept this friend request? Yes, right. And it was like same thing with Facebook and when Twitter came out with that model of just this idea of following and and and it allowed like there was no celebrities on the
Former was like me and Leo, LaPorte and a couple others that were the top fall of people on the platform at the time, but I thought to myself like, wow, if this catches on the with the celebrity crowd, it's just going to be insane. It's going to because everyone will just want to see. And also the barrier to entry a lot of back then. It was, it was, it was impossible to get, you know, celebrities to sit down and kind of do technical things because they're, we didn't really have smartphones, but the fact that you could text to that number, that short code.
Just what you were up to. Anybody can do that. It doesn't require any special software doesn't require you sitting in front of the computer and so it was just so dead. Simple to use it. Felt as though, as I saw the tech crowd, you know, kind of catching on it. I knew eventually it would spill outside of that that small vertical of users into the mainstream and if that when that would happen that was the BET and when that would happen if and when that would happen that would it would it would blow up and and it did so that was it was awesome. I feel
Seen you did a video back in the day when Square was like a prototype is like a YouTube video. I remember you, you're like, hey check this out. Like, you know, here's this little square and you could plug it into your phone. You can take credit card payments. You're like and it was not even released yet and you were like, you know promote I think you did. You invest in that too? Because that would have been like a. So another great story because I hit jack up and I was like, hey I heard you're doing this new credit card thing. I'd like to be an angel investor and he's like dude, it's over subscribed. I'm sorry. Like we've closed the round like ball.
Blah and I was like damn it I'm like well let me see if I can help you in some way and so he gave me a prototype and I just went and recorded a video and it got a lot of traction and they got a lot of people excited about this new product and it was like an early glimpse of what was to come and it started getting, you know, tens of thousands of views on YouTube and he calls me back and he's like, I had an investor Dropout, I've got some room. Do you want to do? Want to put a check in and so, that's what got me into their seed round, which was, which was awesome.
What was it like, you know, I lived in
Francisco from 2012 up until somewhat recently. Shawn still there is something a bit different now because like startups are quite popular and Jack dorsey's, like basically a celebrity Mark Zuckerberg has obviously celebrity. What was, it went back then and 04 05 06. You know, 2010 when these things are just getting going. Did you actually think that a guy like Jack Dorsey was going to be like this kind of like no Titan of Industry like he kind of is like what was it like being around some of these folks early on when they were just you know you guys were just messing around.
Yeah,
well, it was you met a lot of entrepreneurs back then and there was, it was clear. There's a few people that stood out is just being wildly creative and, and just deep thinkers. And I was really drawn to those folks. I wanted to just like pick their brain more and get to know them better. And so, you know, one of the things that struck me is just how mature Mark Zuckerberg was when he was
younger. How old is he? Now he's still only like
38. He's younger than that. Oh my god. Oh yeah, you're right his 38.
Yeah, it's still. That's still.
Is it is 30? That's pretty wild.
Yeah, it it's crazy. So yeah. So when I met him was 2005, I want to say so he was 21. Wow. So he was 21 years old and I remember just thinking about how put together he was and how well spoken and just what a deep thinker he was about the space and he wasn't winging it, he was taking it very seriously and that was a big, big shock to me. I remember, just those conversations being like I was like, wow.
He 421. I was definitely not as pathetic as he was a 21. What's something? He said that made you made you think that. Well, you know, one of the things that I was always frightened by as an entrepreneur in my, in, my youth was just this idea of would people take me seriously and could I admit when I didn't know something, and it was, it was it okay? To, I tried to hide my vulnerabilities as an entrepreneur, and he just came in and was asked
So many pointed questions and, you know, I asked him about some of his hiring and firing practices and how he would edit his team, how he ensured that he made the right higher on the engineering side because it was, it was those very challenging thing to do back then the scale websites. You were like racking your own servers and you know that it wasn't. The AWS is of the world. And we were talking a lot about that. And it was just it was one of those things where he just told me that he just you know, sir it's the obvious stuff, he's
Surround yourself with people smarter than you and then you ask a lot of questions and you're not afraid to ask those questions. So you know, back then I had some great investors and and board members but at times I was a little hesitant to be like, hey I I don't quite understand how this works, can you help educate me and I think it was due to my lack of like for some reason I thought because it was a College Dropout that I had to hide that. And and they would be like if I asked a question that I should have learned in college that, it would have looked
Had egg on my face. And so, there was a lot of nervousness around that and just to see Mark, just be so open and just curious. And there was no, it was clear that if he didn't know something, he was gonna get to the bottom of it right away. It was, it was inspiring.
Our time when today's episode is brought to you by imperfect action hosted by Steph Taylor, it's a podcast on HUB. Spots podcast, Network the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for
Business owner. So join stuff, Taylor. She answers all your business marketing questions and deep dives into the nitty-gritty of online, marketing content marketing, social media, marketing, and marketing for strategy. For business owners, a few recent episodes, include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch. Another one is why growing your audience feel so hard in 2022. And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out. It's called imperfect action. You can look it up wherever you get your
podcast. I had an experience just like that when we were
Our last company I met with all the big companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, whatever. We also met with Discord and I go in, I meet Jason, who's the CEO of Discord and I'm like, pigeon him on like, you know, basically if you bought our thing, like it would add this Dimension to Discord, it would be awesome. And what I was so used to is most Founders, if you're just kind of saying how awesome they are, and how they can take over all these different other so much more they can do out, this is just the beginning. And how there's
These different ways that they can expand normally they're like, yes. Yes, yeah, yeah, totally. We can do that too. We could do that to it. All sounds good and he was just sort of like you know, I would acquire you guys because I like you and I like that you came in and you had this like white board and you just like painted a picture for me, but we won't do any of that. And he's like, no that's not what this court should do, what we should do. And he said no and he was like we should just be this one horizontal utility that does this one thing and that's the right strategy for us. And he was the first guy that said, no.
When I was like kind of giving him some ice cream of like you can have this too when I ran and I just thought oh that's what like this is. This is probably what Zack was like, you know, this is probably with somebody who was focused was like I was back when Zach was building Facebook. It was like my space was adding music and then TV shows and doing these like brand deals in like he was just like, no real names. Simple profiles were just going to let you die. Like, you know, communicate add photos and do the stuff. And like he said no to a bunch of different things which is why is Facebook was such a cleaner site than my space.
And all the other competitors that were out there. Yeah, I would argue, they've lost a lot of that because they say yes to a lot of the cloning of features of other other competitors. But yeah, you're right. That Relentless focus is so essential and often times it's more what you say no to them what you say, yes to on the product side, you know, I that totally agrees and Vibes with me for
sure. Do you have like a set of rules? Like, for example, I know a guy who is incredibly successful, I talked to one times. Kevin Ryan, he started like mongodb business.
Insider Gilt groupe. All these like amazing companies and he was like, well I just do back of the envelope math. And then I give each project six months and me and my partner, typically fund it with 300,000 dollars and we kind of like feel it out. It's a little mathematical but it's also like let's just see what happens in six months and see if this is promising and we'll decide. And so he's like, six months. 300K, can we make something cool? And I talked to Atomic Labs the other day, you know, what? Time of clubs are like that, incubator. That's not really an incubator that like start companies and they said something like, they're like, yeah.
Like sometimes only spend 50 Grand and like two months, or something like that. Do you have like something like that? When you're starting a bunch of projects, like, the fasting app or the meditation app, where you're like, I think he did another one milk or is that the name of the production,
you know, the name of the, the kind of incubator Studio. Yeah, we
created. Yeah. Do you like have rules for what you're looking
for? Yeah, I mean, I guess the question really comes to when you decide to kill something or sell it off or get rid of it or move on to the next thing and and oftentimes, it's
Because your original thesis around, either the market size or just the concept behind it, just didn't take hold and so I don't have any like hard set number of months. Sometimes you're early. So, you know, the fasting app, for example, when I launch zero, it's sad it, you know, tens of thousands of users for the first eight months and then fasting hit and it became more of a household thing. And people were talking about intermittent fasting. It was all over TV and different places.
Pick it up and so people are just naturally searching for fasting in the app store because that's just what they do. And then that's when it exploded to, you know, hundreds of thousands and, you know, million-plus monthly active people doing fast and but it was how do I shut that down after the first six months? You know, what had been too soon? So something like that. If you just believe the market is not quite mature enough, I typically put it into a little bit more of a maintenance mode. You know, a guy got it to that first version where I felt like this is a you
All utility for people that are looking to learn more and get into fasting. Now, let's just let it kind of organically build from here and we were seeing, you know, nice slow consistent kind of week, over week month, over month growth, but nothing explosive, like you. You're used to seeing in a high-growth startup. So if that want that one in particular, was just like, let's just wait around. And then other times, you know, you create something and you've just clearly missed the Mark, it's like we created this app called tiny, which was a fun little photo sharing app yeah. Used.
It, I liked it. Oh, you did awesome. Yeah, I was at these little little tiny postage sighs, sighs looping videos with no audio and we thought it would just be like a little bit more quick. Little intimate way to show kind of how you're traversing throughout your days and weeks rather than having to take the time to set up the look all perfect in front of your perfect, Instagram. If there was less your pressure literally because it was small, right? It's like that part's actually kind of true. Yeah, in that was the crazy one because, you know, we launched
It just it caught fire immediately and we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of downloads in the first week and then it just died off completely and everyone was like a that was a fad that was a that was a fun little fad and that one we shut down pretty quickly after that because it was clear that it was a fun little thing but but there was no depth to it. It was a it was a feature, not not a real product. So okay, so you talked a little bit about like, you know, which one was the most lucrative, okay. Obviously Angel, you know, sort of, Angel Investing in Twitter and then getting into, you know, Facebook and
Another's is works out well which one was the most fun? And kind of with that is. I'm on this Mission. I just you know like after selling companies like I got time and so I was like, all right well what's the party? And I was like I want to find out who's having the most fun in their career and like because that's what I want to do. Now I just have the most of most fun type of crew who's having the most fun with their life right now. So I want to know for you which of your projects must one. And then who do you see who's a blueprint? I could look at where you're like this part. I met this person there.
Having a blast with what they do. Yeah. Well I would say that.
The, you know, there's the nice thing about starting your own businesses as you're doing it because there's a personal dry behind it. Like I've never created anything because I thought here's an opportunity to make money. It's never been that. It's it. We were talking about this as we were just, you know, prior to hitting record or whatever about the little podcast case holder on Amazon, right? And like, there's there's, there's sometimes there's these little businesses where you see a broken piece of an industry. And you're like, well, gosh, if I went out and created this, I could sell X number of units.
Year and it'd be a great little profitable business. And like that's never really interest me. It's more about the this, the creativity of it all and just the exploration of an idea that I'm drawn to and so I know startup is fun, they're all they're all roller coasters loop-de-loops. Like there's the chaos of all those things, right? Especially as you grow your team and there's HR issues and people getting sick and products not getting shipped on time and customers being upset. And you know that there's there's it's
Never going to be just like this perfect dream. But that said, is long, as it's something that you're just naturally drawn, I'm always having a good time and and I'd say though that said, that's kind of a, you know, a little bit of a dodging, the question, but the more recently, when I've got to gotten into the art and nft side of things that world and the world of cryptocurrency is probably the most fun because it is so blue ocean. And there's just so much to be built there. It's not building.
Another app and competing on on kak, in the App Store. It's like it's really. There's, there's so many different directions you can go and, and very few. Well, there there's, there's a decent amount of high-quality entrepreneurs in the space, but not as much as say, you know, building something for the App Store so I enjoy kind of more the blue ocean aspect of that world,
man, I remember when so, basically, I started this company called The Hustle, it was like a daily email and we sold it for we bootstrapped.
Up and sold it for tens of millions of dollars. It kind of, its kind of sounds a little bit similar to what you were saying about your story. Sean also started a media company somewhat recently exited it or sold it for after a relatively short amount of time. And he previously had a tech company. I lived in San Francisco and I started a media company because I was like I'm not capable of starting a tech company but I wish I were and also I'm good at writing and I think maybe it was the same case for showing although he was able to sort of tech company when I saw you went and did
Did the watch site holding key? First of all, Shawn have you ever read that? Like when I when I heard I was like a Blog I like watches. I have Rolexes as like a Blog for luxury watches. What the hell is this guy thinking? Like he just like
he liked it started as something else are you started as like watch velour? So it was like a something else you got acquired or merged and you became like the CEO of this. I remember looking at that should be like I have no idea what the hell he's doing. I don't wear watches so I had no I was completely out of touch with it and it just seemed like
You know, a hobby project at the time and then I started looking into it. I was like, oh, wow, there's like a huge passionate based around this. And this company makes a lot of money than has been arriving in
time. I don't think it did make a lot of money did it. Like, I remember I read that and I was like, I like this business because I'm into it. But like this guy's frankly, way above this. What is he thinking? Like this is he's like the sink needlessly hard?
Well, watch Phil was. So again, like just kind of like personal passion stuff. So I was in a watches mainly because when my father passed away, he left
Left me with a single watch and it's something that I wear every once in a while and it was for him, it was like to afford a single Rolex and I'm in a middle class. Household is a big deal, like that's like back in the 80s, you know, when my dad bought that he was just like, I've made it, you know, I have and I'm not talking about one of the crazy relaxes. I'm talking about just the standard day-date kind of like, you know, simple relaxed and like that was like the one thing he was really proud of, you know, that is like GMC pickup truck, right? And so those
That was something I was left with and then I started reading some of the content. So Ben climber created, ho dinky the actual blog and I created Watch Phil, which was an aggregator and an app that brought together all these different sources so that people can read this stuff in the mobile on their mobile phone because a lot of silly as it sounds back then we most of the watch sites didn't have mobile versions of their site. So they were on just like old old software publishing software that what that was just horrible. So,
I made it all very readable, push notifications, like all the stuff just to kind of a wrapper for like all this great content and it just started growing and growing and growing. And I had a lot of eyeballs. Like, some of the biggest collectors were Now using the product and, you know, I ho think it was the most kind of best prominent source of this content that took a very seriously. So it was, you know, they had a couple full-time writers and so I talked to Ben and said, hey you don't have the tech team here.
Let's merging and combined forces. So we merged the two companies together. He was three or four people, and I was three or four people. I moved to New York became CEO at the time. He was doing, maybe a million and a half to two million dollars a year in Revenue, so just enough to kind of do payroll and we grew from there and then turned on e-commerce and then started selling and creating Partnerships with the big watch brands. And now, you know, as authorized dealers represent, you know, several dozen of the
Watch brands that are out there and that just became a massive. It was still a relatively unknown back then whether or not people would actually spend large sums of money over Apple pay. Right? And so I remember we had someone from Apple that was, you know, helping us on when you get to a certain size, they kind of give you a little bit more concierge help on the apps stuff and they said that they had seen their a 250 thousand dollar transaction come through. Apple pay on an American Express and that was like the
Largest known transaction at that. Never should have been done over. Apple pay for a sight unseen vintage Rolex, which was, which is kind of crazy. But anyway, yeah, so that I mean, new new, new luxury watches are double-digit billions of dollars in a year in terms of Market size. So, it's a big industry that many people. It's not as apparent in the states. When you go overseas 8, you'll see how and in Europe there, you know, watches are so much more kind of a type of thing.
That is worn versus smart watches or more of the norm or no. No, watch it all here in the states. Did you did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue and now it's Sam said, it's over 100 million. Yeah. Yeah, we're over 100 million in Revenue.
Now man, that is wild in sadness and a lot of its Commerce. I mean, you guys like when people talk about content and commerce, I think most of the time it's nonsense like BuzzFeed talks about it and I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't think people are gonna be buying a lot of
Branded BuzzFeed pillows and shit like that or like they had that tasty thing as I don't think people are gonna buy a buzzfeed of it. I just don't think that's going to happen and you guys did it and I was like oh no it's just like going to be a thing. It seems so challenging but you guys are a perfect example of that. And you know what? The other good example, gee, I bet you go to bring a trailer to gonna bring a
trailer.com. I've been to bring a trailer many times. Yeah it is also a dinky. It's one of his favorite sites actually.
They are awesome and so they've done the same thing but with cars we're basically it's like this perfect. I of like I just
Bought one car from actually those websites and but I read it every single day. I'm liking what just see like, what they're going to write about what cool cars out there and then you guys did it with watches and I loved your videos with John Mayer. We talked about his watch collection and all that shit. It's awesome. But what other verticals are what they're like Industries? Have you thought, man? Maybe I could actually do this model. I've always thought software but like that's not nearly as sexy and cool as Watchers and vintage cars. But has there any? It's like when you were like taking out this model, I bet you're at night. You're like, I'm not gonna do
Do it. But I bet you I can apply this here here and here.
Yeah, I mean, in some sense is kind of what we're doing right now in the world of in FTS where there everyone is armed with Photoshop. Can create a digital piece of art on the blockchain and there's this mad rush into the world of in ftes but there is just a ton of clutter right and just a ton of projects to sort through. So what we created with proof was this is idea of
You know, it's the same thing with hood Inky, it's the same Playbook, it's this curation with the point of view where you can have a strong editorial team come in. That isn't talking about the flipping side of the industry that isn't talked about how to make a quick buck in and of teas. That is really talking about what would you buy and hold for the next decade plus, right and the Playbook that that hood, Inky nailed so. Well, was that we took editorial. So seriously and really hired out just an absolute Stellar team of writers that had a deep understanding of
of the World of Watches and not just a announcement, this is a new watch that was dropped but understanding of the mechanics of the internals of the watches so they could tell you about the different movements and escapements and why certain complications were harder to pull off technically than others. And so it was a real Geeks blog and with that technical hardcore writing, develop trust. And so you and once you have the trust of your readers, then you're able to extend.
Bombers in a meaningful way and it's not asking them to buy, you know, a microwave or something like inexpensive or a throw pillow, it's saying we have your trust. This is what we believe to be a very important, you know, watch or collectible and because of that, you know, you're willing to pull the trigger on a twenty Thirty fifty thousand dollar purchase so it's trust is so
essential. Do you think that? Well I at the hustle we are trying to we hired a bunch of riders. Sean hired some writers as well for his thing is a crypto.
Thing. And I've always debated this in my brain. I'm like do I hire good writers and teach them about business or do I hire smart business people and teach them how to write what did you find? Was the best way to do that for
watches? Yeah I mean the best way to do that was to find people that had the natural organic built in a love for horology like just this desire for for all things mechanical watches. So you know, we would have writers if you take, for example,
Like the Speedmaster though. The watch that made it to the Moon from Omega, you know. They could tell you every single variant and movement change and the reasons why and they were just super geeky on this stuff and they may have been just like B+ writers where you get them, but they had the technical knowledge in their brain and that's a lot easier to fix because you get them to put that that technical information out in draft form. And then you just apply an editorial layer over the top of it. Where you have
Copy editors that come in and help you know, stitch together a better more cohesive story before you actually publish it out to the world. Yeah, I left that you're pretty chill guy. When do you get like really fired up? Like what, what gets you excited or in a good or bad way? Like, you know, I get really enthusiastic about the most random shit like, it'll be like a creative project. I'm like I bet I could pull this off and I just go like I just get too excited about it. Sam has that same thing but he also has it where if he feels he's
Long Sam's like you know, willing to fight to the death about it and so he gets really pumped up. What gets you really
pumped up? Great rage is my fuel, I love it, I love
fighting. Yeah, so for me, new ideas and working with creative people is the strongest source of fuel for me. So when I get together with an artist or a fellow entrepreneur and I actually it doesn't have to be someone that has created something big. It has its rather someone that just has wild ideas that that are
Potentially just new ways of looking at the world. So the you meet a lot of entrepreneurs that are opportunistic, iterative entrepreneurs, where they'll see something will say, oh, there's some rough edges on that particular product. I'm gonna go sand them down. Make it easier for consumers, and go launch a business, and they have great success. I like the ones that are just like really thinking about entire new verticals are just flipping something completely on its head and new and creative ways. So that is what I'm really drawn to from just the
Great idea, point of view. And so entrepreneur wise, and when I invest in some of these startups, those are my favorites. Are those those crazy or world-changing entrepreneurs in terms of the, the rage side of things? Do
you have, you've had a bunch of rage-inducing moments. I've followed your career. I've seen, I've seen you do the fucking raccoon. Yeah,
we saw that one.
I've seen people protest outside your house. I've seen you get in trouble for like, I don't know what to do.
Polish like a historical building, I don't know, like the whole story but like you've had, you've kind of been a Target. Yeah, I mean
those those all have their own unique story that the historical building thing was definitely not true. That that that was a, that was a pretty funny one in that. But that was just people wanting to keep an old house up in the neighborhood and they call the historical even though it really wasn't. We wanted to take it down because it was filled with asbestos which we didn't want to live in a house that had asbestos in it, but that's a whole nother story. The Rage stuff, you know, the last
For 25 years of my life has been spent trying to kind of Master my own mind and and it I think that if you can't come to grips with your own a like personal peace of mind, it's it's a horrible place to be. And so, you know, I remember as a young entrepreneur just kind of being on this 24/7. Hustle to go. Build build build. I got to win. I have to win. I have to win. And it created a level of anxiety that was not good for me.
Me and and so I think that's probably why you saw me kind of do things like the meditation app. Another other things because I it was just a natural forcing function for my my own self to like take some of that stuff more seriously. And so I just want to be able to to be able to sit and not have to have my mind be always on and that that's kind of been my goal and it's something I'm still I'm still working on so that it's not like I remember there was this interview with Elon Musk and I'm not comparing myself the on must but I there's one thing that I can certainly relate to
Where he talks about how his mind sometimes, just never shuts off. And he's always thinking about things problems, new ideas, like all these things. And for me, it's always been that, that has been not a blessing, but something that is just been as weighed on me. And and I've always tried to, I guess the big push the last few years has been to try and Wrangle that
what kind of gets you all hot and bothered. Now, we're thinking about like the new Industries or the things that
Excite you. What ideas would you pursue scan
one caveat that you're that you're not currently pursuing? So because it's easy to say I'm excited about this project I'm doing. I think for example, Palmer Luckey was on the last episode and he was talking about. All right, we're like you're doing and to rule you did Oculus. What are the ideas that are on your kind of like? Oh that's interesting. But like I only got one me so I can't go do it, you know. For me, a lot of the stuff that that I think about in that vein, I tend to Outsource and get other people to
Gone. It a lot of this stuff around longevity. I've been interested in it, specifically, a drug called rapamycin where it's been proven now to extend life and in various animals and now apply to dogs. So myself and Jack Dorsey, and Brian from coinbase and a few others, all have been putting money into funding studies at the University of Washington to really prove this out in dogs and canines and then eventually moved into human trials. So you know, some of that stuff and the bio hacking stuff. I still put a lot of
Of effort and time and attention. And I try this stuff out on myself as well. You know, I'm, I'm trying some of these experimental things not because I'm not one of these people that wants to put, you know, young people's blood in them and live forever. I want to die. I just, you know, I do like the idea of not you, since I am an old man. Older dad, I didn't have my first kid and tell my forehead. I was 40. I would like to be around a little bit longer for them, that's that's all
well, I've heard of people doing this. I know Tim's doing this.
What's it called? Silas ilum. Like mushrooms. Yeah, psilocybin. Yeah. And how much does it cost to fund a study and what do you get out of it? Other than like the altruistic of like, well, we're just contributing to like the grand thing. But is there is there like a direct outcome that you can get from it? Like we can use this to fund a company?
No, no not not. In this particular case. Yeah, Tim was also put some money into this one as well. There was there's nothing you get out of the other than just trying to help further science. In this particular case the study was funded.
But depending on the sample size and how many canines you have involved, you can only detect certain levels of output, you need a larger sample base. It is called like a properly powered study, in order to detect, smaller little nuances in the data. And so we wanted to make sure it was powered enough to detect. I believe up to 10% life span increase. And so to power, it was to add another million dollars or so into the study to make sure that what they could bring on the additional canines required to make that happen. And, you know, I put
Doggone it as well and I and he's 12 now and he still runs around like a pup and and I tribute some of that to cycle of this that he did. But yeah, it's nothing other than just like you're figuring out ways in which you can like there's all these different Avenues on the philanthropic side where you're like, what is Meaningful to me personally and this this, this particular study, you know, I think even if it just worked for dogs, would be fantastic. Like forget humans. If I could have my dog.
Live for an additional five years, like, what a win, you know? So that it was kind of a win-win study,
dude, I talked to this guy that was like, building. I think it was called, it's called a ageless RX. I forget his, the name of his company, but he was, he's trying to like, you know, do longevity stuff supplements and shit like that. And things are going well for him, but he was kind of explaining his reasoning. He was like, you know, a lot of people are afraid to take these medicines, but we've been thinking, if we told them it's good for their dog, there actually, will give it to
Dog. And he was he was kind of like hypothesizing to me and like brainstorming with me in real time he was like maybe we should just like do this for dogs and just give it to dogs and if what people see that it makes their dog live longer, then they'll be like, yeah, yeah, you know, fuck it. Give me that pill. I'll take that thing because there's there's so much easier to commence to for to give it to the dog.
I'm with Kevin let the humans die but dogs live forever. Oh for sure. But you know the back to your question though, about what would I go pursue right now in terms of startups that I'm not doing
Doing, I believe, and it's very, very clear. Now, that AI is in the next five years, is going to change, everything was seeing open open a i and a lot of the projects they put out there recently. Will there be creative writing? Or I believe Fiverr as a company it will just be non-existent. It's going to destroy the low end of the creative Market initially and then work its way up the chain. And, you know, just the the outputs that you're getting now from prompt based, you know, the future versions of
Shop are not going to be about moving mouse and pixels around. It's just going to be telling the computer what to do on your behalf. You know, you'll highlight an area and say, you know, change this aspect and it'll all be done via prompt and and meaning you type in what you want to see change and the a well just make it happen. And we're seeing that today and I'm seeing, you know, advancements on the a side and in medicine. Obviously, all the creative side, there's probably a half dozen or so tools. Now, that will write complete paragraphs for you, if you're running.
I fi you give it some initial kind of prompts of where you want the story to go. And the writing is quite good. I have no doubt in the next five years, will see a New York Times bestseller, that was 90% written by AI. So there's just so much interest and with the interest and excitement flows, the engineering Talent. So I've seen a lot of friends that are these. You know, a lot of people I worked with it Google and and other places where, you know, they're they're very insanely,
Using Engineers, you know, previously working on distributed systems. And some of these hard problems that they were trying to solve and now it said, hey, I'm I'm actually going to Pivot into this, this new world of AI. And anytime you watch that kind of flow of high quality, engineering talent, and go move into something, you you pay attention. So I'm looking for at a lot of investments in that particular sector and I'm very bullish on it and something I don't have time to work on but I believe some great businesses are going to be built there.
What would be an application you would want to do in that space? So all those kind of like threads where it's like creative word. Yeah. Edison writing a day. I book is there an application that you can think of that? You're like, I feel like I could solve this because I think that's that's the it's a hammer in search of nails at
this point. Well Sean you made a joke, you made a joke. I always tease Shawn about web 3 because I'm not the biggest fan of it and he was in. We were joking about how he was like coming up with ideas with a. I do you like finally a use case we found it. It like with a
It seems like there's actually way more obvious use cases, right? But yeah, what application excites you?
Oh, I'd love to have that 13 debate at some point to, but on the AI side, you know, it we're already seeing this, right? So, so figma was purchased, by Adobe probably. All saw that, I was crazy acquisition, you know, probably that, that standard these days for prototyping and, and creating interfaces for everything from mobile apps to websites to you name it. We're seeing already built-in plugins to figma that allow you to prompt based build anything?
Thing in in just a matter of seconds. So you can say, hey give me an interface for mobile app that has these five options in this color with this futuristic type style. And, you know, you get something back in real time. And, and, and 25 seconds and it's rough. But it's giving my design team and other designers out there, just a great starting point and it saves them a ton of time and effort, but this is like inning one. I 23 years from now, it'll be doing 90 percent of the work versus, you know, the first right now.
Probably 20% of the work so that is is super exciting in the assistance and time to market for a new ideas, new projects I think is going to be compressed even further. It's the same thing that we what happened with the kind of like late web to when we went from racking, our own servers to fully deployed and an automated and managed, you know, AWS instances that in some of these databases that just autoscale those you through traffic at. It it really compressed the time to go to market
time, you know, by quite a bit. I think we'll see the same thing I learned on the design side. So the speed at which we can develop and deploy new ideas is just going to be you know probably an order of magnitude better than it is today. So I'm excited for that. What
message boards or Facebook groups or websites. What corners of the web? Are you lurking in right now? Like for me, I love Facebook groups. There's always like a weird Facebook group like a tiny example is over Landing because no over Landing is it's like no it's like you know how you see life
Toyota 4Runner Czar F-150s to have like a on it and it looks like they can go in the desert for like two weeks. So I started like joining over Landing groups like three years ago because I was like, oh, this is kind of an interesting turn that's picking up or another one that we got really into a couple years ago was Mobility. So, like all these grown men not caring about yoga, but they called it mobility and was all about like stretching and it's like, what's going on with? There's like all these weird. It's a g guys like doing all this stretching shit. It's kind of intriguing. And like a lot of
times it's like instead of exact instead of
P Executive coaching, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's what happened from from yoga to Mobility.
Yeah, they just change like mayo and aioli and I totally worked. It's awesome. Like I love Mobility now and like for for the body stuff, Tim Ferriss was always pretty good at that. Like he'd be talking about all this weird stuff like fasting. It's like, dude, what the hell is this fasting thing when he talking about and that was like, a really cool corner of the web to like look in on and like, see, like how are the Geeks behaving now? So I can learn like, how the rest of the normal like Average. Joe is going to care about in the next five or 10.
Just. Yeah. Where is it? Chris Dixon quo. You familiar with it. Yeah. But what is the case? It is. What the Geeks are playing with. On the weekends will become like what if we're all using? Like, if several years later it's something some version of that.
Yeah. So like Waikiki places. Are you hanging out right now for Shawna nights? Like a lot of Twitter people. So we'll find like specific people on Twitter. Who are ya? Quirky and we're like, what the hell is this guy talking? He's talking crazy. I mean, it's really cool.
Yeah, I mean, I I follow a ton of people in crypto Twitter. So I pay attention all the onion, you know, the what's happening in web three via
Twitter. And then also you know mostly Discord it's just a lot of private discords. It's a lot of private telegrams, small groups and Gatherings of peers that get together, discuss new ideas, new projects, these Dows, these decentralized autonomous organizations where people get together to discuss and collect and purchase things. So it's a lot of I've never spent so much time in Discord. It's like it's crazy that the conversation has shifted their and Twitter largely. Dude, I hate that, by the way, I
love the fact that like
Digg or Reddit or something exists. Where you can just like if you Googled it and found it like you could participate. Now I'm like, what the fuck man. Kevin probably got this crazy as telegram group that like there's, I don't even I can't get in because I don't even know
exists. No, you can join proof. It's 50,000 dollars in your in, bro. It's easy. No. It's I think it's more, like, people realize that they wanted a little bit more intimate conversation. So I have a feeling that like, there was a lot of of this move to do smaller private Discord.
AIDS and smaller telegram groups because it would lead to just not the masses flooding in and the chaos that you would see on Reddit. And so I that's kind of been the move that I've seen in the the reason behind a lot of that. But it's not hard to get into their use have to actually show them that you, you know what you're doing. Like you have to, you know, get in there and embrace web 3, which is sounds like Sam. You may not be the biggest fan of, but you have to, you have to get in there. And and and, and talk the talk and know where to
And people tell you like, this is the place to be hanging out. Or I'm enjoying this Discord over here you'll learn about this and this is where the AI discords are or whatever it may be. And that's just kind of the new. It's the new Facebook Facebook. It's I'm sure it's good for some things but it's dead when it comes to web three.
You want me to tell you my why? I'm not a fan of this and yes please I'm gonna get you. I'm gonna try and get you fired up here and then we'll talk about this. Let's try talk about proof. I do. It sounds like I'm making an easy out which I kind of a.m. but basically like I am, I'm
I'm decently educated just by hanging out with Sean. And so I have to admit that like some of my beliefs are a little bit loosely held and and I'm not the most educated on the topic but my opinion on a web 3 is basically it's a bunch of like it's just this kind of circular economy of a bunch of people making products to serve an industry. Or I don't know what you called industry, a movement that has yet to truly figure out, like, what the, what the thing is that they're doing and there's so many examples, where people I think are fairly
Egotistical and elitist about it saying like Web 2.0 is old and like the way that this has to be decentralized or this has to be this way. It's like man just because you're putting web 3 in front of something that doesn't mean that there's actually a problem here and I think you're just wasting so much time and energy working on something that is just like a circle jerk. That doesn't actually solve a problem better than the web Point, Web 2.0 version. Also I thought it's pretty dogmatic where it's like decentralize. Everything is like dude I want some stuff centralized like, can you imagine like calling customer service.
Service on a decentralized. Like, like, no, I like there are some things that I want like to have a to be centralized. And I thought that they're a little bit too dogmatic. And I thought that they were oftentimes I'm saying like, they like you people like, you guys like didn't always have wonderful Solutions, you were just making shit up in order to like get in the game and I just thought that it it kind of bothered
me. Yeah, I mean II feel your frustration there and that I too am someone that when I look at what's being built,
Web three if it's just for the sake of calling something decentralized and there's nothing behind it or no structural Advantage for that. Being the case. I think it's it's silly, you know? It's like I'll give you a great example. There's a lot of things that you want to do in web three, some of them are high value and some of them are low value when you were talking about working with the community. So we have a community of people that come together to do all different types of things and some of it is what we call token gated content. So, it's like a membership model where you have to be a member of something on hold.
A certain nft in order to unlock certain access to videos, or content or whatever. It may be. Some of those things can be high value items where you receive an end of tea or something that is actually has some Financial like you know, something behind it. That is a case where you want to actually have that Hardware wallet and pull it out and do it in a way that is secure and that is protected and the rest of the time you don't need that, you can use a Google login, it's okay to use a web to log and it's okay to use your email.
Password with two-factor authentication, like we don't have to throw away. A lot of the Fantastic technology that's been built in web to. There's other things. Like, for example, some decentralised maximalist and I think maximalist is really what we're talking about here because anyone that is a maximalist on
Max. Let's means what you just like extreme. And exchange
means that you are so into something that you can't see any other way. And it's like it's your way or there is no possible. There are
Go out there that say there is no other cryptocurrency than Bitcoin. That's the only one as if he
pumps will. Our buddy is it pop? Like don't they call them online like a Bitcoin Maxi?
He I don't think he I think he is a maxium Bitcoin and and, you know, dorsey's in that camp to where he's like, trying to extend Bitcoin and says that's kind of the only currency and I think this applies to so many different things. Like I don't want to get into Political talk, but any time you get to the fringes of anything where it's like, this is the only thing that matters you get into Crazy Town in my
Of you in. So, you know I think that is a danger of web 3 where there's a lot of that kind of idea. That if it's not pure web 3, it's not right. And I'm with you, I hundred percent agree but that said, I've seen this idea and a lot of the defy tooling when I say defy mean decentralised finance, a lot of the defy tooling that's being built on the blockchain in a performant, way in a cost effective way in a way that when you think about Wells, Fargo as
An organization with, you know, 150,000 employees. I'm just making that up by maybe it's 50,000 or 75,000 it somewhere between that range where that is just a lot of bloat and it and because of that bloat and because of that insane monthly not that that company has to cover. You know, those dollars are not, I'm not flowing to the right people and so there are examples of more efficient ways of doing Finance on the blockchain that that can be done in a trust.
Way written into smart contract code that will mean for better outcomes for the consumer. Now those can be paired with centralized Solutions right like coinbase is a centralized organization. You have an email address, you can send it if something goes wrong with your crypto count but they hold and keep decentralized currency, right? And they do things like decentralize staking where you earn four percent on your etherium. But there are centralized company that gives you that customer support. So
I'm not I'm a I think that the the ones that really win here. Yes. There are going to be the people that say self custody is the only way there's this famous saying that if it's not your keys it's not your crypto. Like you have to hold your own private keys. I'm not in that camp. I do that personally and you safety deposit box in a whole slew of things to safeguard that for some things but there's other Solutions where we're a hybrid approach makes more sense. So know that your argument is completely valid
And that a lot of entrepreneurs are building a web three completely agree with you. And that let's not throw away the baby with the bathwater here. There's a lot of great things but there are also some great advantages that come with being decentralised or a whole slew of other Technologies that's being built on web three that that I could point to that you'd say, like, oh that. Yeah, that actually, that that does make more sense than the old way of doing things. So let's let's do this real quick. So you've probably seen just like this Perma bowls for crypto. There's Perma bears and there
our mission in life is to basically find every stupid use case of crypto and highlight it or every bad investment or every certain clip of a proud. You know, some dude at a 16z who goes on a podcast and says something dumb about crypto, when asked about a use case, you just about me because I was just on their podcast two weeks ago. So, no. But like, you know, there's people that sort of are focused on on poking holes and I think there's some value in poking holes. But there's also, you know, it's a little bit embarrassing to spend your whole day, poking holes on something. Let's put it this way. I'm on this podcast. I'm the the
Crypto believer. I'm the one who puts in a significant portion of my net worth, I have a crypto Media company. I have a bunch of belief in crypto but for this use kit for this exercise here I'm going to point out two things that I think all would be would be, you know, strong and valid points against crypto to somebody like you, who is also a crypto Believers. I want you to kind of argue against these and I hope that this doesn't get clipped as Eric, you know, famous investor X fumbles, the ball when trying to explain, you know, crypto think. So, let's try to do better than that. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so the first
First would be around and if T's right so your begin ft guy. Yeah and there's nft art which I think pretty hard to argue against at this point like digital art cool their ability to own digital or that's one use case for and of teas. Mmm, but a lot of people who believe in nfc's will also say, but that's just the beginning. And if Jesus is that's file format, it's a protocol. There's all these different use cases for n FTS. And I saw the founder of opens the, I think talking about this yesterday on a podcast or he's like, oh, another use cases and a few tickets and they're like. So why would there?
Would you want to have a 10 ft ticket? He's like well because then you know you can plug it into D Phi, and you could take a loan against your ticket and then people were like, why the fuck would I want to take a loan against my 60 dollar like concert ticket like this is that right? Really? What the hype is about and it's sort of a silly use case. So I would like you to give me the non silly and ft use cases that you're excited about. Yeah, let's take the ticket example and and the art one is easy. It's a new canvas, but let's actually discover that first. The art one is easy. It's a new canvas.
You can do things and pull from real-time data to display are in very unique fun creative ways, right?
Like it's really not that much different than your then Rolexes. I mean, like, there's no reason why a Rolex is 150,000 dollars other than like, a lot of people think. It's
cool. Yeah, well I would say there's a difference there because it's something you may not know about Rolexes. They make over a million Rolexes per year and so, Rolex hides that number and the reason they hide that number is because if they didn't have a sense of scarcity around it, and
They do this specifically when you go in their stores are always be a next time you walk by an actual true, Rolex boutique noticed, how there's like some missing spots and in when you go inside and that's all play. It's play because they're like, oh, they're sold out, they're not available but we can put you on this list and in three to four months, we might you might get a phone call, guess what? You always get the phone call. And and the watch is coming because they're making a million a year. The nice thing about, you know, the one of the things that I was always so confused by
Is I was a comic comic book collector way back in the day and I bought Wolverine number one because I love Wolverine it was like my childhood like I always wanted to own one, right? And so I bought Wolverine number one and it always hovered around $50 and I was like, why is this not going up? It's a very first Wolverine launched in the 80s, right? Wasn't the first appearance of Wolverine but it was the first Wolverine Comic and I finally got ahold of a really well-known collector and he goes, oh you guys you don't know if they knew by that point that Wolverine was a hot character. And so they printed over
Hosanna copies of that first edition as like, oh shit. Like that's why there's just the flood of these in the market. So you know in Ft is the beautiful thing about this is when you have it on, it has produced a piece it has proven proven on so you know where it's come from has proven scarcity. So you can't like, great, you know, additional add-ons or duplicates because it's all recorded on the blockchain and then you have the unique ability to do very creative, things like animation oracle's work. The art can change based on the stock market price or time of
Day or a phase of the moon. And there's just so much more extension. It's a new vertical for art. Fine. That's great. Awesome. Like digital frames are going to be getting better. It is going to be a thing. Like there's no in my mind. There is no argument to be had there that this won't be. I don't that against the theater future or the inevitable and art is the easy use case for entities per ticket thing is different, right? So, the ticket thing I I'm with you, like, I understand that people are trying to like create these fancy financial instruments.
To like Leverage you on anything that you own, they're like, hey, you have a ticket to that upcoming concert that sold out. You know, spin into this defy unit and take a loan against it and then you can buy it back. If you use the money in the short term, and it's like, that's all bullshit, man, that nobody's going to do that, right? It's don't get me wrong. There's there are specific use cases, where that does make sense like loan against ftes is going to be the same thing that happens. When Christie's gives you a loan against your Picasso, right? Like these happen, this happens all the time. It's just a parallel for the digital
The world. There are certain types of assets digital assets, that getting loans against them, if it's something you want will make sense. The tickets thing for me is very confusing, but while I will tell you is interesting, and I've talked to actual rock stars about this, like, I had Mike Shinoda from Lincoln Park on my show, and he's a huge fan of tea fan, and he creates them and awesome Flex. By the way,
you know, I've talked to some rock stars about this, I'm gonna that's a bit like I know. I'm not making fun of you. I'd say that's cool. I think it's
cool. I think it's important because you want to get the artist is by in on this.
No, I'm saying it's cool. Yeah. Yeah, he's an awesome guy. Very approachable were very approachable in the terms of Rockstar, guys. But no, no will tell you that, like, what we talked about, which is an obvious one is like, well, let me step back. One thing I believe to be true, 90 plus percent of people that interact with, in of, T's over the long term. I believe won't even know it. As they're doing it as an mft, it'll just be something where they have a
Digital wallet and app or something like that and they have a ticket they're right. They're not going to know that behind the scenes. That is powered by the blockchain and recorded by the blockchain, right? So I think what's going to happen is the nice thing about the blockchain is because it is a ledger in immutable Ledger. That is, that is a way to say improve that you have done something that you either attended an event. Or you've, you know, you've actually physically done something, there's a ton of possibilities that I can unlock right if I go
I see Mike Shinoda play, five shows or ten shows, maybe he says. Okay, now according to the blockchain in our app and again, the consumer doesn't need to know about this. Anyone that's attended 10 of my shows gets a VIP meet and greet before the show, right. And there's a thousand different things that you can do that. You want to have that security of the blockchain behind the scenes so it's not being forged so there's not being copies of it being made so there's not like a way to fake it and that's the nice thing about the blockchain is it provides you a way?
Way to have the security and knowledge, that something is not being faked. And you can imagine that's broadly applicable to a whole slew of different Industries. I don't think we'll be calling them quote unquote in FTS, you know, it's just going to be a great piece of tech. It's just another database. That's all it is. It's as a distributed immutable data base, that is decentralized. It sets all this is which unlocks a bunch of fun, new use cases caveat all right so let's say because I think I get it when I get what you're saying. But I also get the the Irish
That people get when it's like, cool tell me like how this is going to make my life better and it's like well the cool thing about a blockchain is that it's provable scarce it's like it's like what you're telling me about the Under the Hood part. Whereas, for example, if my mom is like, if I'm like Mom you should set up an email address. She's like, what the heck is email? I don't need that. And it's like, well, no check this out. Like, you know, you send letters or, you know, you send letters to your sister who lives across the country, like, watch this, if you do it this way, it's free. And it will be instant and like, oh wow, that's cool it. Hey, you know, it's even better because it's all
digital. You can just type the word and it'll find that file. You don't have to keep it organized somewhere in the folder in your house. Right. So I can I don't have to tell her how it works at all. I can literally just say it made your life better by being by giving you, you know, more time or money or whatever. And so I think the question is, what does entities give? What does what will an N of T? Give a person that makes their life better without explaining how how the tech works at all. Sure I'll give you I'll give you a great example of one that hasn't launched yet but something that that I'm personally working on.
So I'm working with a well-known like, very cold tea. Kind of wine producer out there and you know, wine at the highest level at the high end. It's a tricky business because there's, you know, forgeries, there's fake labels. There's they're putting holograms on the side of them, they're putting chips inside of the labels so that they can be scanned to prove. That they're authentic, right? That's one piece. So the first question is, if I'm buying off the secondary market and not directly from the producer. Am I getting?
Something that's legit. The second piece of that is once I receive that bottle, you know. How do I store it? Turn sure that if I'm going to keep something and I want this asset to appreciate over time and I want to drink a decade from now or two. Then you know, how do I ensure that it is being stored the right way. So one thing that is happening in the next four months will be the issuance of in FTS to people, that is going to be from a major well-known Winery, where it will represent one physical bottle of wine.
There's a couple advantages here, one, you don't have to take possession of it right away, you can let it sit in it's proven perfect storage conditions and age for decades to come. You can let it appreciate in that in those storage conditions and you can hold onto the proven ownership of it as in an of T. Let's say that bottle of wine for four or five axes over the next decade you don't ever have to then pull the wine in out of the cellar. Take ownership of it, find a third party to sell it and then resell it.
Where that person is questioning the authenticity of that wine. Instead, you can just transfer the nft to a buddy. You can gift it to them for a special occasion or an anniversary. And then when they decided, hey, I want to drink this. They press two buttons in that bottle of wine, that has been stored perfectly for a decade shows up at their door. That is efficiency that eliminates fraud. There is just so much to love that equation, and that will be applied to the watch industry, to the luxury world, to all these different verticals, and it just makes sense. Like, what about that?
Just curious. If as you hear me explain it doesn't sound like a better world like in terms of fixing a bunch of problems. I think if I was going to argue against that like just a steel man the argumentation, I think it would be cool like maybe it's gonna maybe these are certificates for Collectibles most, you know that it's not going to that doesn't impact. Most people's lives is most people are not collecting high-end bags or wines or this where there's a huge problems of forgery like that that maybe one thing which is it's not going to impact that many people in that sense all you're still married and if these are the
Is game changing, world changing technology, but that's a really Niche specific, you know, one-percenter type problem. And then the other is like, you know, sounds like an N of T, is like a digital certificate. Your you could have done that with another type of certificate or another type of database baby and I but maybe this is better, like I do agree. It's better but like it was possible before. I didn't take the impossible and make it possible. It made the the possible maybe made it more efficient or a little bit more convenient for the consumer. And I think that would be maybe one argument against it, but I don't want to go too far in the weeds. Yeah.
The other thing that I think that to add on to that though, is that because you have, well, I'll give you example back to the. Rockstar example of an artist you're Reliant upon the if you did want to do some type of Rewards program or something. For actually, let me step up one point with the point you made about the one-percenter problem and is this applicable to those people. You're absolutely right like there's only certain number of people they're going to collect art at the highest level and why at the highest level and all of that I mean granted these are double digit billions of dollars of your like big
Gets to go after. But you're right these specific use cases that I'm giving are very Niche. I think on the more broadly on the idea of just membership and access and prove where you've been what you've done to lock/unlock loyalty and rewards over the long term and think about, you know, replacing the AmEx points or you know, other point type systems reward systems with blockchain. The beautiful thing about it being decentralized and this is one argument for decentralization is that it's forever on the
And you're not dependent upon a company being around for that the for that to exist. So if an artist is engaged with a startup that is working on a Loyalty Rewards program for them and they run out of capital and died. Three years later as long as they store their information on the blockchain that artists can then just pick up where they left off and it just it continues forward. And we've already seen this happen where there's been several startups that have stored their information on the blockchain where they go out of business because they just their idea didn't hit. And then someone,
Fills the void and comes as I have a better take on this. And now let me tap into that public data and use it going forward. So that not All Is Lost, which is kind of a New Concept, and rather than a just a database going away. It's always going to be there and can be reused, which I think it's pretty pretty compelling. The really simple to Second example of this, is you play a game, you could you get really into Fortnight, you go buy a bunch of skins, you dress up your character, you got the cool, you know, like glider and you bought all that stuff and you know a year and a half.
By your friends have moved on. They're all playing Call of Duty. Now you've sank three hundred fifty dollars into Fortnight. You don't own those items, you can't resell those items. You can't recoup any of that value. Nor could you take those items into any other game? So in a web three World, either another game could come out that says, hey, we accept item, we plugged into this protocol so you can bring your cool sword from game one to game two. That makes the sword more valuable because now it can be used in multiple games. So maybe I'm we're seeing this already. The interoperability between
In multiple web three platforms saying that this is a defined standard. And now these items can digitally move between platforms and makes a ton of sense. Now those items are more valuable because they can be used in more places and the other one is that if I'm just done with the game I can just dump it onto the next person who's really interested in for diet. And I can recoup my, some of my investment which will make more, people want to spend in games because it's not just a money pit. It's an asset that they could resell, all right? So that's like the quicker example, maybe I love that. You join my side in your address, but I have to argue the other way in order for this to be
Let me look at the end. You're like, I get it. I'm in the do nerd. Argument would be okay for years, but people have been saying that Bitcoin is these this inflation hedge or this currency that doesn't flate. And oh my God, you know how lucky for you guys? The US government starts printing trillions of dollars. Inflation is at record highs. It's in the news every day. Wait, what happened to that? Awesome. Inflation hedge asset. Why is it down 50% when inflation is the bigger problem than ever shouldn't this? Be sure.
In this, be your time to shine Bitcoin. So yeah, what say you to that? Yeah. I mean, it's a real shame that the Bitcoin has been so spiky because if it had it been this, linear growth to 20,000 to where it is today, we'd all be like, this is the most amazing thing ever like, like if you just take the spikes out and make it look, linear it still looks like an incredible asset like, you know, just go back, five years, look, where it is now versus five years ago. So it's the spiky nature of it that that hurts it in the end. I would say that.
I'm a fan. I think Bitcoin is is a tough one because it's I don't like that. It's not a green currency and I don't see a clear path that ever being the case. And I know everyone's trying to extend it new and exciting ways and try to make it more aetherium like and so that it can do more than just be this type of digital gold for me, you know, when I think about those types of assets, it's I'm responsible in that I am not betting the farm on this, but it is it a small percentage of my portfolio.
Oh, Leo. Absolutely. And I just considered another asset class that provides me a little bit of diversification across the board. So, you know, the majority of my, you know, personal Holdings is still standard, you know, index funds, that that are pretty vanilla, the low-cost index funds, you know, the Vanguard Way, right?
Yeah. And I was actually going to ask that what what is your liquid portfolio look like like where I like I was I was been waiting to ask you
that. Sam is like a ETL low-cost ETFs and
bonds dude.
80% in did Vanguard index funds 20% bonds. That's all that I build private businesses. Yes. On like, has put everything into.
I'm like I'm addressing crypto and then like you know, five companies I believe in and you know, a little bit of index funds like that. It's like yeah 0 like it's like 5% or something like that. It keep 10% cash or something. And so what would your what would your pie chart look like and obviously it changes over time. Yeah, so my pie chart would be essentially this, you know, 80% well.
Well, I think there's an important thing to caveat here, is that as a Venture Capital Partner over true Ventures. I have a lot of risk on the table, there in Venture early. Stage Investments. Did you have to
put your own money into that? Or is that
just your care? I do. Yeah, I put my own money into it as investing partner. You also invest alongside the fund so that is my bucket of risk, right? So just setting that aside and saying, okay, you know, I have carrying the fund. That's why you could have high, you know, high risk too much capital of right. You put like, I don't know.
Like quarter million dollars or a million dollars in like that into that, it depends on the size of the fund. It's a percentage of the fund. We just close our latest fund, which is 750 million. And so, the partners put in a percent of that, in back into the fund, I'd have to look at what the exact numbers are, but it's substantial. They want you have skin in the game when you're investing. So, you know, I consider that to be like, those are those the big high risk buckets. So everything else I do I want to be just super vanilla and it's that, it's that
That Vanguard index fund, keep it, you know, keep it really simple. I don't do bond funds. I'd rather rely on people to buy Bonds on my behalf. You know, I'm laddering into bills right now because you're getting four plus percent in the short term. And so, you know, just just Ladder into those makes a ton of sense right now. You know, anyone out there that has 10 grand, that sitting around, that doesn't go by and I bill right now. It's turning over 9% is just insane. Like, that's the most noble.
Rainer scenario for someone that's listen to this podcast, by the way, there's like one week left of that, right? I was like yeah that's right, obviously not investment advice but you are getting the full faith of the US government as the backer and it's over nine percent. And you can do 10,000 for yourself and 10,000 for your spouse, which is amazing. So, anyway, it's I keep it really simple and then and then the rest is, is the crypto. The crypto side of things is like, you know, let's call it, 50 percent in FTS and fifty percent digital assets.
And that's, you know, probably 10% of My overall. Okay.
So 90% of non Venture stuff is in just an index
fund. Yeah. Yeah. And multiple index funds that cover a variety of markets. But yeah, a little context real estate at all or no. Not really other than just, you know, my own
stuff. Do you own or rent? I, we're, we've always had this debate and I know you gotta go to MIT. I hear alarms going off, but we always have this debate. Well, we both agree. I
I own I wish I would have rented dude. I just want to rent everything. I don't want to own a lot of stuff. Do you regret owning or do you like being
an owner? You know, the thing is, when interest rates were low, you can just take a bunch of capital back out of your house and pour back into the market assuming that you're going to beat that. You know, if you could get own a house, take a loan out against against against that house and get, you know, to pick a couple couple of points and and earn 5 to 7 in the market. Like, I'll take that Delta all day long. So that's kind of the way I play
it.
Cool. Well dude I'm really happy. We got to talk. I used to work out of the Reddit, building third and Brian and I remember seeing you walk by and I was like oh shit that's Kevin. I wish I would have said hey that was in 2012. So it's only been 11 years later, ten years later, but I'm happy that we are able to talk. I've been a big fan of yours. I know Sean has as well, so it's really exciting to be able to meet you.
I love that you guys are doing this show. I mean, it reminds me a lot of like, the kind of fun little hash out debates, that Tim Ferriss. And I have when we do our random shows, like, they're just fun, right? You give a couple of friends together and shoot the shit.
Didn't some some crazy discussions come out of it. So that's that's great. Dude.
Those were, I can't believe how big those were back. Then I remember the, the Kevin and Tim shows. I think they call that he like had a funny name for you. Like, Tim Tim.
Tim, you know, I call him Tim. Tim still and he, yeah, Kev Kev. But yeah, we just shot one here in person, maybe, two weeks ago, which was fun. It was good to see him again. I had seen them in a minute, but let me that sound like little things you like. I remember, you talked about women Hoff back then, and I was like, you know, next day I'm on my floor like,
Breathing everything on purpose.
I even remember your white it dr. Dhara is that her name is Ari. Yeah. Daria like it's funny. It's like that stuff was so infamy. It still is but it was like particularly when I was in 22 and just getting into Silicon Valley. Like I really looked up to you guys as like, just show me how to Silicon Valley, you know what I mean? It was really
cool. Yeah that was that was a fun. I was I miss not living in the same city is Tim because we always have getting some trouble when we're together.
So well, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having
me.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to
travel. Never
looking back.
